Abstract
Margot Canaday The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. 277 pp. ISBN 978–0–691–13598–4, US$39.95 (cloth)
This book is an outstanding piece of historical scholarship that focuses on analysing sexuality and policies on immigration, the military and welfare, from the early twentieth century to its closing decades. Canaday traces the development of federal policies in these areas from ‘nascent policing’ to the ‘explicit regulation’ of sexuality, focussing on gay, lesbian and (to a lesser extent) transgendered issues. Her work is based on painstaking archival research and provides a more detailed and in-depth analysis than anything I have read previously. She also uncovers fascinating accounts of individuals standing up against persecution (pp. 201–204). One can only applaud the bravery of one soldier, accused of lesbianism before a military inquiry in 1958, who declared that: ‘I don’t feel that I am being treated like an American citizen… I would like to know why’ (p. 264). As Canaday points out, it is a question that still needs to be answered in the US today. The analysis pays major attention to gender, including the relationship of historical categories of homosexuality to constructions of masculinity and femininity. For example, Canaday argues that it was mainly female heterosexuality that was regulated early in the twentieth century. It was only as women began to gain citizenship rights that issues of female homosexuality became of more interest to the state (p. 13). However, she sees the policing of lesbianism as playing a major role in how the regulation of homosexuality, and conceptions of homosexual identity and community, developed (pp. 178, 213).
This outstanding book will justifiably become the definitive account of the historical development of the US ‘straight state’. Nonetheless, it has some limitations. There are times when the analysis is possibly being driven too much by its embedded theory. For example, the argument sometimes revolves around when a heterosexual/homosexual binary was explicitly constructed in federal policy (pp. 3, 134, 172) given there were earlier periods in which a clear category of homosexual seems absent. The resulting analysis is productive and tells us a great deal about the role played by the state in the construction of the category of homosexual.
However, is not the construction of explicit binaries only part of the story about how the straight state regulates sexuality? Is not the straight state often still constructed via conceptions of heteronormativity that do not involve the explicit construction of the homosexual binary ‘other’ but marginalise same-sex couples simply by shaping benefits and policies around a heterosexual norm? Canaday is at considerable pains to argue (e.g. p. 140) that discrimination against homosexuals was increasingly not just ‘inadvertent’ via the privileging of heterosexuality but ‘deliberate’ and ‘built into the very foundation of the welfare state’. However, surely the key point is not that some historians could wrongly describe such outcomes as ‘inadvertent’ but that normativity is a crucial power relationship in its own right. Being ineligible is therefore just as important to document as the presence of explicit exclusionary categories. The book could also have engaged in more depth with non-US literature that analyses the straight state, for example the British sexual citizenship literature by David Evans, Diane Richardson, David Bell and Jon Binnie. The lack of engagement with relevant literature and examples from other countries sometimes means that key points about the American experience are not analysed sufficiently. In her ground-breaking study, Political Institutions and Lesbian and Gay Rights in the United States and Canada, Miriam Smith (2008) argues that the different pace of reform in Canada and the US was partly caused by the legal legacy of slavery on US conceptions of rights and equal protection. Claiming rights against discrimination at federal level in the United States usually requires the assertion that the plaintiff’s identity is an immutable category – which race, but not sexuality, is claimed to be.
Smith’s insight could help to explain a paradox that Canaday draws attention to, namely that ‘a national policy of second class citizenship for homosexuals’ was sometimes being constructed at the very time as the federal bureaucracy was building up an apparatus supporting racial equality (p. 258). Smith’s insight also suggests that the legal implications of how homosexuality shifted from being constructed as involving physical causes (pp. 29–35, 43), to being constructed as a psychiatric condition (pp. 215, 220) and eventually a lifestyle choice, could be emphasised more. Greater examination of why state benefits have been tied to marriage in the US would also be useful. As Smith also points out, the trajectory of granting same-sex couple rights has been very different in countries where benefits, including health benefits, are distributed more as individual citizenship rights. The trajectory has also been different in countries, such as Australia, where heterosexual de-facto couples, not just married ones, have long been recognised for purposes of state entitlements. However, such minor reservations do not detract from Canaday’s achievements. The Straight State makes major new contributions to our understanding of the role of both sexuality and gender in the historical development of US public policy.